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Description

Striking large format map of Australia, New Zealand and the Southe Pacific, extending to Fiji, the Solomons, Papua New Guinea, Timor and the Celebs.

The outline of Australia, which had finally been circumnavigated just ten years before by Matthew Flinders, encloses a vastly empty territory labeled New Holland in the West and New South Wales in the East. Australia would not become the official name for the continent until 1824.

The map shows Australia's geographical features and place names, and also includes labels describing which explorers found which areas. It also offers helpful descriptions such as "the land here is very arid" and "high trees, natives seen."

John Thomson Biography

John Thomson (1777-ca. 1840) was a commercial map publisher active in Edinburgh. He specialized in guide books and atlases and is primarily known for his Atlas of Scotland (1832) and the New General Atlas, first published in 1817 and reissued for the next quarter century. The New General Atlas was a commercial success—it was also published in Dublin and London—and it compiled existing geographic knowledge in compelling ways for a wide audience.

His Atlas of Scotland introduced new geographic information and was the first large-scale atlas of Scotland to be organized by county. It provided the most-accurate view of Scotland available before the Clearances. Work on the atlas began in 1820 and led to Thomson’s bankruptcy in 1830 due to the high costs of gathering the latest surveys and reviewing the required materials. Despite the publication of the atlas, Thomson declared bankruptcy again in 1835.